Why CDN Makes Sense For Your WordPress Blog

Content Delivery Network or CDN allows you to serve your static content from multiple cloud servers rather than only one hosting server. The primary goal is to serve content to users in different geographic locations with high availability and at top speed. Here’s how it works. When a user visits your WordPress blog, they are redirected to your web host’s server (such as HostGator). Suppose your web host’s server is located at a central location such as Houston, TX. Every user accesses this one server to view your WordPress website. If you have high volume of traffic, then your server may overload which results in a slow-loading site or even a server crash. CDN allows you to avoid this situation because it is a network of servers, but just as importantly these servers are spread throughout the world. By using CDN, you can cache your static content such as images, stylesheets (css files), javascripts, Flash, etc. and store it on all of these servers. When a user visits your site, the CDN technology redirects them to the closest server seamlessly and quickly.

In other words, if your main server is hosted in Houston, TX, and someone tries to access it from Durham, England, then he will be redirected to the closest available server (perhaps in London). This limits the number of internet trips or stages that are needed to transmit the static files to your end user. The user’s proximity to any web server has a great impact on load time. By organizing your content across multiple geographically distributed servers, you can make your pages load faster for users across the globe.

Crash Resistance – CDN allows for distribution of the load to multiple servers instead of having 100% of your incoming traffic routed to a single primary server; this load sharing reduces the chance of a crash.

Improved User Experience –CDN helps to decrease your bounce rate on the site as well as increase the unique pageviews generated by each user. A fast site delivers an improved user experience, and that gives you better metrics at the end of the day.